Life & Wisdom Quote by Ivo Andric

Progress has a shadow, and Andric refuses to let you admire the light without noticing who got burned. “Lands of great discoveries” sounds like a museum placard: brave expeditions, new maps, the romance of human curiosity. Then the sentence pivots, bluntly, into “great injustices,” collapsing the heroic myth into its hidden invoice. The craft here is the parallel structure: discovery and injustice aren’t merely correlated; they’re twinned, made to feel like two names for the same historical machine.

Andric, a Balkan writer shaped by borderlands and empires, understood how “discovery” is often a word used by the powerful to narrate other people’s dispossession as destiny. The subtext is an indictment of the way cultures congratulate themselves for exploration while treating conquest as an unfortunate footnote. “Lands” matters too: not “people” or “states,” but territories - places that can be claimed, renamed, administered. Discovery becomes a property transaction, and injustice becomes the operating cost.

There’s also a quieter provocation: injustice isn’t presented as an accident that occasionally accompanies innovation; it’s scaled to match it. “Great” repeats like a gavel. If you want the grandeur of the first clause, you inherit the magnitude of the second. In a century scarred by nationalism, war, and imperial aftershocks, Andric’s line reads less like moralizing than like a hard rule of history: every triumphant story about finding the new is also a story about who was made expendable to build it.